This is the month.
The month in which I may or may not shave my armpits.
"Tomorrow makes one year," I told Erick a few nights ago as we sat around the kitchen table, eating a delicious coconut curry he'd whipped up whilst I guiltily lingered in one of Mexico's rare hot showers.
"What do you mean?" my couchsurfing host asked between mouthfuls.
"I year ago today, I made the decision to experiment living life without vanity. Not shaving my armpits or my legs, not wearing makeup, not buying clothes for the sake of impressing other people. The purpose of this experiment was to understand where these decisions came from -- if they came from a place of shame or fear or if they came from a place of personal expression. I like to know why I do things. I like to know that I'm living my own script and not something written for me by someone else."
Spending three months in fashion oriented Istanbul last winter/spring revealed to me the "appearance" scripts in my life. In that Turkish city, so much of a person's value was determined by cleanliness and style that I felt poked, in a way. All subtlety of the script was lost in the glaringly apparent way appearance was pedestaled as what makes a person"nice" (also a clean house. Clean houses with nice couches and good coffee make you "nice"). I was pushed so hard to conform that I was able to sense that this appearance oriented script was most definitely not mine. Just like I learned that Christianity was a script given to me by my family and community and that my radical love of Bubbies pickles dipped in peanut butter was inflicted on me by my mother.
(thanks, mom)
Peanut butter with Bubbies pickles, I'll deal with later. That's a deep rooted addiction which probably represents equally deep psychological (or physiological) problems and I'll tackle this issue when I'm a stronger, more mature individual. I anticipate it will take years to sort out.
But vanity and religion?
Easy, peasy.
As my general method for exploring the emotional, mental and physical obstacles I find in myself is... err.... giving myself no choice but to explore, I chose to leave every article of clothing and every piece of makeup in my green rolling bag in the closet of the spare room of my Turkish family's home in Beylikduzu.
And I'm poor. So I can't just go and buy more mascara or another sexy bra. Something fabulous about being poor is that I just don't have the resources to realistically support physical vanity. God, being poor is the best. Sometimes. Other times, I want to buy a piece of delicious cheese. And can't. And then being poor is not the best. Then being poor is something else entirely.
As for religion, I'm floating in a cloud of curiosity above all that. Buddhism is currently catching my fancy, but I'm not allowing myself to be grounded in any system of belief.
As for peanut butter with Bubbies pickles? Eh, I'll get to it one of these days. And maybe the dire pain of its absence will drive me back to Jesus.
(btw, if you've never eaten peanut butter with Bubbies pickles, take off your judging boots)
I'd like to stress that these experiments aren't meant to prove that Christianity or vanity or peanut butter with Bubbies pickles are inherently wrong or even that I don't agree with them/love to munch on them always. I just want to know that the important decisions I make in this life are originating as much as possible from within and as little as possible from without. I want this life to be a manifestation of my script -- an expression of my curiosities and passions and not just a funky cover of a popular song.
If I follow Jesus because my family follows Jesus, it's meaningless. If I ever return to Christianity, I want it to be from a blank, yet whole place wherein I know without a doubt that the faith is mine. I refuse to allow something as profound as the spirituality I live to be a direct product of my upbringing. When I interviewed people across Spain, Italy and Ireland, the most common response to "what is your religion/spirituality?" was, "Catholic, not practicing." Which is dandy, but personally, I want practice. And I want active practice driven by passion and not routine. Right now, I am actively, passionately practicing curiosity.
If I cake my face with various powders and dyes, shave my body hair and wear uncomfortable pants merely because this manner of self-presentation is so valued by today's society, it's equally meaningless. This is either living life on auto-pilot, nary a question, nary a qualm, or it's shame, fear and manipulation. Which doesn't even qualify as a funky cover of a popular song. It's just lip-syncing along because you never took the time to learn to sing.
(Again, I'll leave the peanut butter and Bubbies pickles for later)
The first few months of loosening my stranglehold on Christianity and curiously opening up my mind hurt. Like HELL (which I don't believe exists, but is still incredibly useful for comparisons and such). There was confusion. There was a crushing sense of insignificance and debilitating hopelessness. There was me. Alone. Without the Jesus I'd spent the last decade of my life crying to, pleading with and all other manner of "laying burdens at the foot of the cross".
After eight years of actively practicing curiosity, I've found that if I use my confusion to inspire questions instead of panic, I'll live a life of constant discovery. I've found joy and awe in my insignificance and am neither hopeful or hopeless. As I kind of stopped believing in a future after I let go of the concept of being allowed to live after I die. And now there is me. Without Jesus, but more at peace and less alone than I've ever been. Able to connect with people in a more loving, intimate, meaningful way than I could have ever imagined. A kind of connection not possible across the devastating divide of "I'm right, so you must be wrong."
The first few months of loosening my stranglehold on physical vanity and vulnerably revealing my body hurt. Like HELL. My ego wept through its lipstick-free lips and gnashed all its ego teeth. I felt inadequate. Unprepared. Less than. I felt out of place. Frumpy. Foolish. I'd look in a mirror and never see me -- just see what was missing. The missing bit that used to make me look a bit better. I always felt uncomfortable leaving whatever home in which I happened to be living because I "wasn't ready". And when out and about town, I remember not being able to look through shop windows to see products. My gaze would inevitably stop short at my face and my form. I would sigh and think, "You only look so bad 'cos you're not wearing makeup or that pretty green dress Baris gave you in Nice."
I lived a life of incessant, maddening comparison. My current appearance against my past appearance. My body against the bodies of those around me. I would compare and I would judge. And judgment was hardly ever favorably directed towards my current self, not that the direction really matters. Judgement is judgment is judgment, and judgment of any kind seems to represent an underlying insecurity. The positive aspect of crazily excessive judging was that the past me (pre-forced vanity experiment) would have caved to the pressure and simply shaved my legs. But me during the experiment observed the feelings of awkwardness, embarrassment and inadequacy and then allowed aforementioned leg hair grow wild and free. Which taught me to mindfully observe the pressure and judgment I felt and not make my decisions from that place.
It took months to stop reacting to the reactions of others. The most common was a brief explosion of total shock followed by a blanket of forced calm. My reaction to the reactions of others was to justify my gorilla pits as soon as possible. Context wasn't really important. I just needed my hairy pits on the table pronto.
"Have you been to India yet?" someone might ask.
"No. Right now I'm not so focused on meditation and pranayama. I'm actually doing this experiment about vanity and blablabla....and that's why my pits... gorillas...society... blablabla...."
No more justification, Bourget. If you keep justifying your body, you're never going to feel comfortable in it. Just. Let it. Be.
So I stopped justifying myself. I acknowledged the shocked expressions and chose to treat their reactions as none of my business. If hair came up naturally in conversation (as it does, upon occasion), I'd do my best to share my reasons without justifying myself.
And now, after a year of actively practicing vulnerability and abandoning my Gillette and Maybelline, I find myself hardly ever needing to justify the way I look. I feel prepared the moment I put on my glasses (girl doesn't even really need a bra these days). I feel like I'm plenty enough, thank-you very much and who gives a damn about feeling "in place"? Out of place is perfectly delightful (I recommend a one-way ticket to Out of Place. Yesterday). I can look through windows again and I remember that pretty green dress as something I loved, but not something I needed to look beautiful.
Other results of Aimee's Year of Cavewoman Legs include the following:
a) The less I judge myself, the less I judge others.
b) The less time I spend comparing, the more time I spend understanding and appreciating.
c) The less I justify myself, the more open I am to loving myself.
d) When I don't react to the reactions of others, I allow myself to live more fully by my own script
In conclusion....
A year of vulnerably revealing my physical self to myself and the world around me, without comparison, judgement or justification has taught me how to connect with my physical self in a more loving, intimate and meaningful way. A kind of connection not possible across the devastating divide of, "this is when I am beautiful and acceptable and this is when I'm not."
We attract what we put out. I don't get whistled at nearly as often when walking down the street or hit on by strangers in bars. Instead of attracting people attracted to appearance, I've attracted people attracted to me. In all my vulnerable, hairy, comfortable plants glory. Hence, this last year has gifted me with some of the deepest, purest human connections -- romantic and platonic -- I've ever experienced.
And I think I'm going to keep my hairy legs. I rather like them. They let me feel the breezes. And I rather like breezes.
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